Russian President Vladimir Putin said yesterday that in his view the whole of Ukraine was ‘ours’ and cautioned that advancing Russian forces could take the Ukrainian city of Sumy as part of a bid to carve out a buffer zone along the border.
Ukraine’s foreign minister denounced the statements as evidence of Russian ‘disdain’ for US peace efforts and said Moscow was bent on seizing more territory and killing more Ukrainians.
Russia currently controls about a fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea, more than 99 per cent of the Luhansk region, over 70pc of the Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions, and fragments of the Kharkiv, Sumy and Dnipropetrovsk regions.
Asked about fresh Russian advances, Putin told the St Petersburg International Economic Forum that he considered Russians and Ukrainians to be one people and ‘in that sense the whole of Ukraine is ours’.
Kyiv and its Western allies say Moscow’s claims to four Ukrainian regions and Crimea are illegal, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has repeatedly rejected the notion that Russians and Ukrainians are one people.
He has also said that Putin’s terms for peace are akin to capitulation.
Putin, who ordered troops into Ukraine in 2022 after eight years of fighting in eastern Ukraine, said yesterday he was not questioning Ukraine’s independence or its people’s striving for sovereignty, but he underscored that when Ukraine declared independence as the Soviet Union fell in 1991 it had also declared its neutrality.
Putin said Moscow wanted Ukraine to accept the reality on the ground if there was to be a chance of peace – Russia’s shorthand for the reality of Russia’s control over a chunk of Ukrainian territory bigger than the US state of Virginia.
“We have a saying, or a parable,” Putin said. “Where the foot of a Russian soldier steps, that is ours.”
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Andrii Sybiha, writing in English on the X social media platform, said: “Putin’s cynical statements demonstrate complete disdain for US peace efforts. While the US and the rest of the world have called for an immediate end to the killing, Russia’s top war criminal discusses plans to seize more Ukrainian territory and kill more Ukrainians.”
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